i noticed you mentioned it was a "draw" format, that will generally take care of cheating, buddy tournaments are where most of the cheating goes on. another option on prizes is have local stores donate some door prizes, coolers, tackle boxes, a rod, a reel, and such. if your trying to raise money you could also raffle some donated items, our club used to sell raffle tickets a buck a piece or 6 for 5 bucks, most folks would buy the 6 tickets.

another thing you mentioned was measureing fish to the closest 1/2, most measuring boards will measure down to eights of an inch, i would also make sure everyone uses the same brand/type of measureing device. when i lived in texas, we fished a few lakes with "slot" limits in a club i was in, we used a chart compilled by Texas parks and wildlife that converted inches to a weight, ie: a 20 1/8" bass would be weighed as 4.83 pounds, a 20 1/2" bass would be recorded as 5.14 pounds. we used this when we would fish the slot lakes and we could "keep" our best five fish, we called these our "paper tournaments" they were acutally a lot of fun, but the bad thing is depending on what kind of fish you catch (a bullet or a football) the weight can vary drastically, i have caught 20" fish that weighed around 6 pounds, but i have also caught some 20" fish that would be tough to get four pounds of weight out of[&o], but in this case you go stricly by what the conversion says (a 20 1/8" bass weighs 4.83 pounds) no more, no less


sound like you got a pretty good grip on this, i will agree with chuck that the pot could be a little sweeter, either by adding more boats (but no more than 20 total) or making it a winner take all, JMHO


BTW, a side pot for big fish would be a great idea